


Love Me, Love Me

by buoyantsaturn



Series: solangelo week 2k18 [4]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Child of Iris Nico di Angelo, M/M, Seer Will Solace, also personality swap if you squint, godswap technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-06-27 16:23:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15689058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buoyantsaturn/pseuds/buoyantsaturn
Summary: As the boy got closer, Will felt himself zoning out and slipping into a vision. The same boy is in front of him with the same backdrop of Half Blood Hill, though this time his hair is firetruck red. Nico, the vision supplies. The boy’s name is Nico. Nico’s smiling at him with a beautiful bright smile, and he reaches up to frame Will’s face with his hands, and then they’re kissing--Will was pulled out of the vision by the sound of a sucker popping out of Nico’s mouth.





	Love Me, Love Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unwieldyink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unwieldyink/gifts).



> happy solangelo week!! i'm so excited for yall to read this one omg it's based off of one of annabel's (pjozz on tumblr) moodboards for an iris!nico godswap and ive been wanting to write seer!will for the Longest Time ok so i did and sorry to anyone who was looking forward to another aphrodite!nico and hades!will fic im sure there will be another in the future sometime but this idea was too good to pass up and i think you'll like it so enjoy!!
> 
> title is love me, love me by big time rush (what a bop honestly)
> 
> also!! this fic jumps between past and present tense. sometimes i do that on accident when im tired but in this fic its completely intentional! anything written in present tense is a vision that will is having. i figured that would be less distracting than italicizing whole paragraphs

“Will!” 

Fingers snapped in front of Will’s face. 

“Prank in the woods,” Will announced, shooting upright in his chair in the infirmary, blinking the vision out of his eyes. “Capture the flag. Ares against Hermes.”

Kayla crossed her arms. “Nothing more specific?” 

Will rubbed at his eye. “Flashbomb, I think? No injuries from it, not that I saw, anyway.”

“Okay. So, if you’re done zoning out, can you change the sheets on the first three beds?”

Will stood up abruptly. “Um.” He looked around for a second like he’d forgotten what he was doing. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve gotta…” He stepped around the desk he’d been sitting at and walked toward the door. “I’ll be back, I think.”

He left the infirmary, unsure of where he should go next, so he wandered in the direction of the Big House. 

“Ah, Will,” Chiron said from the porch. “I was just on my way to look for you. I’ve been informed that a new camper is on their way here, and I was wondering if you knew anything about them yet.”

Will scratched the back of his head. “A son of Iris?”

“Interesting,” Chiron commented. “We haven’t had a new child of Iris in quite some time. I hope you will be available to show him around once he arrives?”

Will nodded. “Yeah, I can do that. He’ll be here soon, I think.”

“Thank you, my boy,” Chiron told him before trotting away.

Will spun back around and started toward Half Blood Hill, figuring that that was the most likely place for a new camper to arrive, accompanied or not. He’s just about to start climbing the hill when he sees a figure coming down toward him.

The first thing Will notices are the bright red shoes - Doc Martens, maybe, and possibly a few sizes too big considering the fact that they looked sort of like clown shoes in Will’s opinion. Next were the lime green skinny jeans and the oversized, 80’s patterned button down. His sunglasses were big and round and mustard yellow, and while they went well with the shirt, they clashed horribly with his wild, violet hair. 

Will wondered how he could have possibly forgotten a vision that included such a sight, but maybe his dad had kept it from him just so that he could see the look of shock on Will’s face. Will also wondered how he could possibly think that this boy pulled the look off.

As the boy got closer, Will felt himself zoning out and slipping into a vision. The same boy is in front of him with the same backdrop of Half Blood Hill, though this time his hair is firetruck red.  _ Nico, _ the vision supplies. The boy’s name is Nico. Nico’s smiling at him with a  _ beautiful _ bright smile, and he reaches up to frame Will’s face with his hands, and then they’re kissing--

Will was pulled out of the vision by the sound of a sucker popping out of Nico’s mouth.

Will blinked a few times. “Um.”

“Is this clown camp?” Nico asked, tilting his sunglasses down and glancing up at Will over the rims. 

Will’s eyes flickered down to Nico’s shoes before shooting back up to his eyes. They were dark, nearly black, though Will thought that he could see flecks of gold surrounded by all that brown. “Uh, what?”

“Clown camp,” Nico repeated slowly, raising an eyebrow.

“This is Camp Half Blood,” Will told him, trying not to feel offended.

“That’s what I said,” Nico said with a roll of his eyes, pushing his sunglasses back up his nose. “Are you gonna show me around or something?” 

“Oh! Yeah, I am. My name is Will, by the way,” he said.

“Nico.” He popped the sucker back in his mouth and started walking. 

Will had to jog a few steps to catch up. “So, uh, what do you know already? About...all of this.”

“Oh, you know,” Nico started, talking around the sucker. “Monsters and magic and all that.”

“I think I’m gonna need you to be more specific than that.”

Nico took the sucker out of his mouth again. “I got attacked by something that looked like it came from the movies. I can somehow magically drain the color out of just about anything--”

“Woah, really?” Will cut in. “That’s cool, I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Yeah? And what can you do, blondie?”

Will blushed at the nickname, and he thought he saw Nico smirk before closing his lips around that sucker again. “Oh, um. Well, I’m a child of Apollo, the god of healing and prophecy and all that? So sometimes I can, uh, see things.”

“Well, no shit, I can see things, too.”

“No, I mean, like,  _ future  _ things,” Will explains. “Like, right when you got here, I saw--” He cut himself off before he could embarrass himself, and even worse, reveal the future.  _ Never reveal the future, _ Apollo had told him the first and only time Will had met him.

“What?” Nico asked, sounding genuinely interested and excited. “What did you see?”

“There’s gonna be tater tots for breakfast tomorrow,” Will blurted, and Nico seemed to deflate beside him. 

“Wow, some power you got,” Nico scoffed. “I’m holding you to that tater tot thing, though.”

“Anyway,” Will said hurriedly, ready to change to topic to  _ anything else. _ “You know about the gods, right? Like, that they’re real?”

“Even if I didn’t, I could’ve guessed it from you saying that your dad is Apollo,” Nico replied. “If you can see the future, then does that mean you already know who my parent is?”

“It’s Iris, goddess of the rainbow,” Will told him.

“Fitting.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh. Uh, okay. Um, I’m usually the one that’s asked to show people around because I can almost always figure out who their parent is before anyone else. See, the gods made a deal a few years ago that they would claim their children by the time they turned thirteen, but sometimes they can be pretty forgetful. At that point, it’s up to me.” Will stopped at the steps of a vibrantly painted cabin. “This is your cabin. Your siblings are inside.”

“Siblings?” Nico repeated, eyes widening like he hadn’t been expecting that.

“Butch is the oldest,” Will said, knocking on the door. “He’ll show you around from here. I’ve got...work to do.”

The door swung open to reveal a tall, muscular boy with buzzed blond hair. “Solace, who’s this?”

“Butch, this is Nico, your brother,” Will said. “Nico, Butch Walker, head counsellor of the Iris cabin. Uh, sorry to cut this short, but I really should be going, so I’ll, uh, see you guys around.”

“Come on in, Nico,” Butch said as Will started to walk away. “Let me give you the grand tour.” He held the door open so that Nico could walk inside, and he swung an arm out to gesture to the single room. “Here it is. That’s my bed by the window. Over there--” he pointed to a bed on the opposite wall, “--is Steph’s bed. She’s only ever here in the summer. Bathrooms are outside the cabin in a separate building.”

There were three other beds that laid unclaimed. On the middle bed, Nico noticed something long wrapped in white tissue paper. Butch seemed to follow his gaze.

“Oh, I found that this morning. Must be for you,” he said. 

Nico walked over to the bed, dropping his backpack at the foot of the bed before picking up the package - it was far heavier than he’d been expected, and there was a tag on one end that said,  _ To: Nico, From: Mom. _ Nico ripped away the wrapping to find a pure white sword with a silver hilt. 

“Cool,” Nico said. “I’ve always wanted a sword. So this is mine, then? The sword and the bed?”

Butch nodded.

Nico reached for his backpack and pulled out a roll of rainbow stickers. He peeled one off the roll and stuck it to one of the bedposts. “Nice.”

 

* * *

 

Will was sitting at his desk in the infirmary, absently tapping a pencil against his clipboard, waiting either for someone to come in or to get a vision that someone would be arriving soon. He’d zoned out so much that his view of the opposite wall had blurred almost completely, and he felt like he might be about to slip away into a vision, though someone stepped in front of his desk right at that moment.

His eyes focused on Nico standing before him - clothes just as perfectly, hideously mismatched as the last time Will had seen him, though his hair had faded considerably. His arms were covered in cuts and scrapes and burns, which Will could only assume meant that he’d just come from the climbing wall. Before Will could greet him, he finally felt himself slip off into a vision.

It’s short, but Will sees Nico, slightly older and with dark green hair, sitting on the floor of the infirmary’s storage closet. He’s smiling up at Will, marking things down on the clipboard in his lap. He’s helping Will take stock of the infirmary’s supplies, something that Will’s always hated doing, but he feels in the vision that he doesn’t really mind it right that second.

“Hey, earth to blondie,” Nico said, snapping his fingers and Will out of his vision. “Can you help me out?”

“Um.” Will blinked up at him, trying to imagine this Nico - Nico with lavender hair and a softness to his expression that showed that he hadn’t dealt with the same traumas as many other demigods - with the same relaxed smile that Will had seen in his vision. “I’m not a healer. I can find Kayla for you?”

“No.” Nico crossed his arms. “I want  _ you _ to help me. I wanna talk to you.”

“Oh, uh, okay.” Will scrambled up from his seat and followed Nico to one of the cots. “What did you want to talk about?”

Nico dropped onto the cot and shrugged. “I dunno. Just wanna talk.”

Will felt his face heating up so he turned away to grab a chair. “Oh. Well, uh. Was this your first time on the climbing wall?”

“How’d you guess? Or did you  _ foresee _ it?” Nico teased. Will didn’t respond, ducking his head shyly and turning away to grab a first aid kit. Nico nudged the toe of his shoe against Will’s ankle. “Hey, I’m just messing with you.”

“Yeah. Right, okay,” Will said softly, before switching into Doctor Mode right before Nico’s eyes. “So, a few scrapes and some burns, anything else?”

Will glanced up at Nico through his lashes, and he thought he heard Nico gasp softly.

“No, that’s it,” Nico said breathily. He cleared his throat as Will started treating and bandaging his injuries. “You should tell me more about your powers.”

Will’s fingers stuttered over Nico’s forearm. “What do you want to know?”

“How does it work?” Nico asked. “Like, what triggers it?”

Will hesitated. “Well, uh, I don’t really know. Sometimes it’s seeing something, or hearing something. Sometimes it happens when I’m anxious. I dunno, sometimes it just happens.”

“So,  _ seeing something, _ like, when you see me?”

Will’s eyes snapped up to Nico’s. “Um.”

“You kinda look at me funny sometimes. Is it because you’re seeing things? Is it bad? Am I gonna get, like, seriously hurt or something?” Will was used to seeing people spiral once they knew about his powers, but Nico was spiraling  _ fast. _ “Are you even allowed to tell me about it? ‘Cause telling me about it might change the future and we’re not allowed to mess with the timeline or whatever--”

Will snorted.

“What-- Are you  _ laughing _ at me?” Nico asked, joining in on the laughter when he saw Will’s shy smile. “Here I am, afraid that you’re foreseen my terrible, gruesome death, and you’re  _ laughing _ at me!”

“You’ve watched too many Sci-Fi movies,” Will told him, blue eyes glittering with his laughter. “You can’t mess with the timeline when there’s just one timeline. Whatever happens, happens.”

“Oh, so you’re just gonna let me suffer a painful death, then?”

“You’re not gonna die,” Will said. He leaned back for a second, thinking. “At least not anytime soon. Not that I’ve seen.”

Nico leaned forward, like he and Will were attached by an invisible string. “So you  _ have _ seen stuff about me.”

“Maybe,” Will said, wanting both to pull himself away and to hold his ground. “Nothing bad, I promise. The opposite of bad, in my opinion.”

Nico grinned. “And what’s the opposite of bad? In your opinion.”

“Um.” Will’s eyes flickered down to Nico’s lips, pulled tight around his smile. He tried to look anywhere else so that he wouldn’t feel compelled to kiss Nico before he was supposed to, and instead his eyes landed on Nico’s hair. It looked somewhat like a purple-tinted cloud, and Will wondered if it was soft despite the hair dye. “Your hair faded kinda quick.”

For a second, Will thought he saw Nico pout. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s not like dye usually stays in all that long, anyway.” He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it away from his face and revealing his overgrown roots to Will.

“Is your hair white?” Will asked.

“Yeah, it makes it really easy to dye since I don’t have to bleach it first,” Nico said. “It’s always been white, as far as I know. Mama said I have some kind of pigment thing, which is why I’m so pale, too, but all the white makes for a good canvas, don’t you think?”

“Well, it, uh, certainly makes your hair pop.”

Nico smiled. “I haven’t decided what color I’m doing next. Have any suggestions?” Nico cocked his head to the side, and Will felt himself slip out of the present.

They’re in the strawberry fields, sitting on a picnic blanket. There’s a basket of food in between them. Nico’s smiling at him from across the blanket, leaning back on his hands with his head cocked to the side. His hair is freshly dyed, hot pink, and Will can see spots where the dye has stained his skin.

“Pink,” Will said before he’d even left the vision. When his eyes refocused on the boy in front of him, Will saw Nico smiling softly at him, just like he’d been in the vision.

“I was thinking pink, too.”

 

* * *

 

Will’s dreams have always been different than the average demigod dream. For one, demigod dreams were generally useful in some way, whereas Will’s were always controlled by his emotions and showed him a very clear glimpse of his future. Unfortunately, those glimpses were for the most part useless to him as they wouldn’t happen for quite a while, and they usually left him flustered for at least half the day. 

An example of this was the dream that Will had that night. 

He and Nico are sitting on the beach at camp. There are fireworks going off over the sound, and Will manages to fill in the blanks that tell him that it’s the Fourth of July - at least a year away, then, since it was September in the present. Nico’s hair is orange like a pumpkin, and it looks softer, more wavy, more like he learned how to better take care of it in the last year. Nico leans over to whisper something in Will’s ear, though he can’t hear it over the booming of the fireworks.

Nico stands up suddenly, and he pulls Will up with him. Then they’re running from the beach and towards the cabins, and they’re laughing and smiling. Nico pulls Will into a kiss before dragging him into the Iris cabin. Nico falls back onto one of the beds - the bedposts and headboard are covered in little rainbow stickers - and he’s smiling as he pulls Will down with him and--

The sounding of a horn woke Will up for breakfast. He groaned, trying to smother himself with his pillow before Kayla yanked it off his face and told him to get up. Will had always been glad that Kayla was the cabin’s counsellor. She was the best healer they had, and she had a way to get people to listen to her. Will, on the other hand...Well, all he could do was warn everyone about the Hermes cabin pulling a prank - like they didn’t already know that was going to happen.

Will was the last of his cabin mates to make it to the dining pavilion for breakfast, though it wasn’t anything unusual so Austin had grabbed him a plate of pancakes before they ran out. He sat down and started cutting into his pancakes before a shock of bright pink caught his eye from the breakfast line. 

Nico’s hair looked like it had just been dyed that morning, and it seemed like it was still wet from the shower. Will got caught staring after just a few seconds when Nico spotted him and winked. Will ducked his head and stuffed a bite of pancake into his mouth. 

He’d finished the first pancake and moved onto the next when Nico suddenly perched himself on the edge of the table next to him, a plate of pancakes and fruit in his hand. “Have you ever been on a picnic?”

Will struggled to swallow a too-big bite and coughed a few times before he croaked, “What?” 

Nico rolled his eyes, though Will could still see the corner of his lips quirked up on one side. “Have you ever been on a picnic?” he asked again, slower this time. 

“Uh, no?”

“You should meet me in the arena right before lunch,” Nico told him, plucking a single grape off his own plate. “We can skip lunch and go on a picnic instead.” He winked before popping the grape into his mouth and hopping off the table. Where Nico had been sitting, Will saw a single rainbow sticker stuck to the table. 

 

He had a boring day in the infirmary, like usual. Sometimes, he wished he was a healer so that he could do something interesting instead of taking stock in the storage room or changing bed sheets or doing laundry. 

He couldn’t have been happier when lunch time rolled around and he finally had an excuse to leave, though as soon as he stood up to go, he felt his legs starting to shake from nerves. He was about to meet Nico for a picnic. He might be going on a  _ date _ with Nico, and he had no way of knowing whether it was a date or not until he made it to the arena where he would be meeting Nico. 

Will managed to walk all the way to the arena without chickening out, and walked through the door as soon as the horn sounded for lunch. There were a few campers sitting in the stands, watching as Nico sparred with one of the sword fighting teachers. 

He was good.  _ Really _ good, especially considering he’d only been at camp for a couple of weeks so far.

Will watched him whirl around his opponent, his solid white sword slicing and stabbing and parrying, seeming to absorb bits of color from everything it touched - like drops of watercolor on a sponge, soaking into the weapon after a moment and disappearing. Somehow, instead of tiring out, Nico seemed to gain more and more energy with every strike. 

Finally, Nico managed to disarm his opponent, the celestial bronze sword clattering against the tile floor. 

Nico raised his sword in triumph, facing the stands first, and then turning to face Will with a bright smile on his face. “Will!” he called, and Will felt himself smiling back. “I’ll be ready in just a second.”

He tucked his sword into a holster on his belt before running toward the stands and grabbing a picnic basket. Nico brought the basket back to him, holding it with one hand and reaching for Will’s hand with the other.

“What do you think, the strawberry fields seem like a good picnic spot, right?” Nico asked, tugging Will along behind him. 

“Uh, sure, yeah,” Will said. “I mean, I’ve never been on a picnic, so I don’t really know, but I trust you.”

Nico smiled at him over his shoulder. “Did you  _ see _ our first date happening in the strawberry fields?”

Will felt like his face had caught on fire, and his hand was sweating like crazy against Nico’s. “Maybe.”

When they reached the field, Nico passed over the picnic basket to Will while he unfolded the blanket that had been inside the basket all along. He laid it out on the ground and sat down, patting the space next to him and looking up at Will expectantly. 

“So, um, what did you pack for our picnic?” Will asked, wiping his sweaty palms on the thighs of his jeans. 

Nico looked embarrassed for a second before the tugged the basket closer, opening the lid to start digging around. “Well, I was told that you can get anything from the Hermes cabin, you know? So they let me borrow the blanket and the basket and whatever, but I only had so much money to actually pay for food, right? And it’s not like they’re exactly caterers, so I got the best I could get.”

Nico pulled two Lunchables out of the basket: one pizza pack and one cracker stacker.

“I know it’s not a lot, so I have some chips too,” Nico said quickly. “And there’s the strawberries, of course.”

Will couldn’t contain his smile. “I haven’t had a Lunchable since I was, like, five.”

Nico’s sudden nerves seemed to melt away in an instant. “Then I hope they’re as good as you remember.”

The two of them cracked into their Lunchables, eventually digging into the chips and reaching for fresh strawberries while they talked with each other. 

“So,” Will started, “you’re, uh, pretty good with a sword. Where did you get that one?”

Nico reached behind himself and grabbed the sword, pulling it onto his lap. “Iris gave it to me, I guess. Butch said it was in the cabin the morning I got here, and it was addressed to me. It’s cool, right? I wish I knew what it was made out of, though.”

“You told me before that you could drain the color out of things,” Will recalled. “Were you doing that earlier? With your sword, somehow? Do you think you could...show me?”

Nico grinned, reaching over the edge of their blanket for a few strawberries. He held one in his fingertips, concentrating on it as its color drained, soaking into Nico’s skin. His once brown irises vanished to a solid white while his powers worked, and once they reappeared, they were more vibrant than they had been before. 

“Wow,” Will whispered, staring into Nico’s eyes rather than at the pale, white strawberry between them.

“I can do the same thing with the sword, too,” Nico told him, taking another strawberry and setting it on the blade in his lap. The color seeped out of the fruit just as it had done before, soaking into the blade and disappearing. “Cool, right?”

Will nodded, and Nico moved the sword off of his lap. He leaned back on his hands, cocking his head to the side and smiling at Will. Will felt a sudden wave of deja vu, remembering his vision of this exact moment, though Nico brushed it away simply by speaking.

“Alright, it’s your turn now,” Nico said.

Will blinked a few times. “My turn for what?”

“I showed off my powers, so now it’s your turn,” Nico clarified. Before Will could argue, he continued, “And I know you can’t really  _ show off _ like I can, but you should tell me more about them.”

“I already told you about it,” Will said. “What else do you want to know?”

“What kinds of things do you see?” Nico asked.

Will dropped his gaze down to the blanket, picking at a loose thread near his leg. “All sorts of things. Nothing good, usually, but sometimes I can stop someone from getting in the way of a dangerous prank. Sometimes I don’t even see things, I just get a feeling like there’s someone I need to talk to or somewhere else that I need to be.”

He heard Nico move beside him and looked up to see Nico much closer than he had been before. “Do you ever get feelings about something you should do?” His gaze flickered down to Will’s lips, and Will felt his heart stop.

“Sometimes,” Will whispered. He hadn’t meant to, but he couldn’t manage to speak any louder with Nico so close to him. 

“You said you saw our date happening,” Nico reminded him. “Did you see a kiss, too?”

Will was hit with the memory of a vision, of Nico with firetruck red hair pulling him in for a kiss, and somehow Will knew that that would be their first.

“I have,” Will replied. “But it’s not today.”

Nico pushed himself even closer until their noses bumped together, before he sighed and fell away. “I guess not.”

 

* * *

 

Will and Nico were practically inseparable for the next week or so. Will would go to watch Nico spar in the arena on his free time, and Nico would come to the infirmary to hang out with Will on his. 

They were folding up freshly washed bed sheets when there was a knock on the door. Chiron was the only one to ever knock, as he prefered not to be in such a confined space unless it was an emergency, so Will excused himself to answer the door. 

“Hi, Chiron,” Will greeted. “What brings you to the very quiet infirmary?”

“Why, I’ve come to see you, of course,” Chiron replied with a smile, but Will couldn’t bring himself to smile back. Nobody ever came to talk to him unless it was because of his powers. “I’ve received word that a quest is needed. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on who should head this quest, or if you have any other insights you’d like to share.”

“Oh,” Will said. “Um. No, I haven’t heard anything but--” He glanced over his shoulder, watching as Nico slipped a roll of rainbow stickers out of his jacket pocket and stuck one of the stickers to the filing cabinet next to him. He remembered those stickers from the dream he’d had of Nico kissing him, and he remembered the vision he’d had of their first kiss - of Nico with red hair and the backdrop of Half Blood Hill - and Will realized that he did know something.

“It’s Nico,” Will said. “I don’t know if he’s heading the quest or not, but he’s going, at least.”

“Thank you, Will,” Chiron said. “Please, send him to come speak with me once he’s done…” Chiron peaked around Will to where Nico had completely abandoned sheet folding and was instead putting rainbow stickers all over Will’s desk and supplies. “Ah, vandalizing the infirmary.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said. “I’ll let him know.”

Will shut the door as Chiron turned away, and he pretended not to catch Nico sneaking the roll of stickers back into his pocket. He tried not to let his anxiety bubble up inside of him at the thought of Nico going away on a quest. 

“I think I’m gonna dye my hair again soon,” Nico said as he returned to folding. “Got any color suggestions?”

Without even taking a second to think about it, Will said, “Red.”

 

Chiara and Paolo signed up to go on the quest with Nico, and while Will was certain that Paolo was supposed to go, he wasn’t sure that Paolo really knew what he was signing up for. 

Will had helped Nico pack for the quest, since Will had a vague idea of what Nico might need and he had access to first aid kits and the infirmary’s ambrosia supply. His anxiety had steadily grown as Nico’s quest grew closer, though Nico quickly learned that there was an easy way to distract Will when his anxiety got bad. 

Nico stilled Will’s shaking hands as he struggled to pack the first aid kit for Nico to take with him. 

“Hey,” Nico said softly. “You don’t need to be so worried. You said yourself that I’m gonna come back, so just remember that. I’ll be back soon.”

“I know,” Will said, “but all I’ve seen so far is  _ distant _ future stuff. I don’t know if this quest will take you a week or a month. And I don’t know if you’ll be okay when you get back, and--”

Nico pressed his lips to Will’s cheek, and Will froze.

“I’m gonna be fine,” Nico told him. “I know because you’re gonna be watching out for me, right? So there’s nothing to worry about.”

Will sighed, lifting their joined hands and pressing a kiss to Nico’s knuckles. “Thank you. Please try to be careful.”

Nico rolled his eyes, though he was still smiling. “Of course, blondie. Now c’mon, let’s get me ready to go.”

The quest group had just enough time to eat lunch before they had to leave for the city to get on a train. A few campers - including Will, of course - followed them to the base of Half Blood Hill to wish them luck and say goodbye. 

Will fussed over Nico - his hair having been freshly dyed red right before lunch - to make sure that he had everything he needed: clothes, food, money - both American and Greek.

“I’m fine, Will,” Nico told him with a laugh. “I’ve got everything I need.”

“Are you sure?” Will asked. “You have the first aid kit I got for you?”

“It’s in my bag,” Nico assured him. They stopped at the base of the hill, away from everyone else that had gathered, and Nico turned to face Will. “I’m gonna miss you, you know.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” Will replied, reaching down to grab Nico’s hands. 

“You better be thinking about me while I’m gone,” Nico demanded. “If you find out about something dangerous coming after me, you better tell me, got it? ‘Cause I wanna be perfectly healthy when I get back so that the first thing I can do is kiss you.”

Will tried to will the blush from his cheeks. “Or you could kiss me right now.”

Nico smiled, cocking his head to the side. He slipped his hands out of Will’s and said, “No thanks.”

Nico turned away, taking a few steps up the hill, and Will felt his heart plummet. Then, suddenly, Nico spun around with a bright smile on his face. He framed Will’s face in his hands and pulled him in, pressing their lips together sweetly.

“So much better,” Will sighed, knocking his forehead into Nico’s. 

“Hmm?”

“In my visions I can see things, but I can’t feel things,” Will explained, staring at their feet. “I’ve been wondering when this would happen for so long, and now that it finally has...the reality is so much better.”

When Will looked up again, Nico’s cheeks were pink. “Well, then, you’d better keep holding onto that feeling until I get back, okay?”

 

* * *

 

Will was, essentially, useless while Nico was gone. His anxiety levels were through the roof, which meant his powers were completely uncontrollable. He felt like he spent more time in the future than he did in the present, which left him spaced out in the Apollo cabin, or at the dinner table, or at his desk in the infirmary. His siblings would snap him out of a vision, only for him to slip into another a moment later.

At night, Will’s dreams would switch rapidly between demigod dreams of Nico and future dreams of Nico - sometimes distant future, and sometimes very near - and sometimes the dreams repeated when the present finally caught up with Will’s seen future. 

His dreams showed Nico and the others, gradually gaining cuts and bruises and slowly losing color as Nico drained their clothes and his own hair for energy. 

Finally, Will was given a vision of Nico and Chiara and Paolo returning to camp, safe if not uninjured and alive if not barely conscious. They were all clearly exhausted, their clothes completely drained of color, and their steps stumbling as they struggled down Half Blood Hill.

Will couldn’t wait any longer, so as soon as he’d woken up the morning after that dream, he walked to the base of the hill and sat down on the ground to wait. 

It was just after sunrise that Will noticed the first figure cresting the hill, and so he jumped to his feet. Nico came stumbling down the hill, followed by Chiara and Paolo, and from a distance the three looked like ghosts rushing toward Will. 

Nico collapsed against Will’s chest, one hand fisting in Will’s camp t-shirt and sucking the color out of it at rapid speed, without even a simple  _ hello _ for a greeting. Nico took a shaky breath as the new energy entered his body, and he was finally able to smile up at Will.

Will made sure that the three of them managed to get to the infirmary before he went to wake his siblings for help. Kayla and Austin returned to the infirmary with him to treat Paolo and Chiara, and Will returned to Nico’s side with water and ambrosia and a granola bar. 

Nico seemed to drain the color from everything he touched without even realizing what he was doing, even sucking the pale blue from the blanket that Will covered him with once he fell asleep. 

Will laid down next to him, finally allowing himself a moment to relax since Nico had left, falling asleep and dreaming once again of the boy beside him. However, instead of watching helplessly as Nico ran from monsters and struggled to patch up his own wounds, Will sees a sleeping Nico with pure white hair. He’s on a cot in the infirmary, on his side and facing Will. His eyes flutter open and he smiles when he sees Will, then shuffles closer so that he can tuck his head under Will’s chin to fall back asleep.

It was this same sight that greeted Will the next time he opened his eyes. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! see you tomorrow for the last day of solangelo week! it's been fun yall!!


End file.
